Contents

Quote of the week

"Huge investments into radio programmes and mobile phone GBV [gender-based violence] messages should be made so that rural women, who are not reached by the 16 Days of Activism campaign, can access messages on gender violence."

Comment of the week

"The retraction of international funding and the need to connect to individual donors will result in the survival of the nonprofits who do not just do good work, but who report on their work and connect with their public."

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Copyright

Capacity Building, M&E, 16 Days…

Nonprofit organisations (NPOs) and donors are often criticised for introducing development projects that are not in line with the needs of communities. Community-led interventions have the potential to achieve their objectives as they are in most cases beneficiary-centred and sustainable.

In this week’s edition of NGO Pulse, Judith King, communications and advocacy manager at the Centre for Economic Governance and AIDS in Africa (CEGAA), writes about the success of the South African Budget Monitoring and Expenditure Tracking project which CEGAA conducted in partnership with the Treatment Action Campaign. King notes that the project demonstrated that citizen involvement in economic governance is possible and progressing. She further states that the project empowered citizens with skills to research and track the quality of HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis services in the community and demand answers, among others.

In a related article, Kerryn Krige, programme manager for the Network for Social Entrepreneurs at the Gordon Institute of Business Science, urges NPOs to build their internal capacity to measure the impact of their work and remain competitive. Krige maintains that in addition to enabling organisations to demonstrate that they are doing good work, measuring their work will further assist them to stay connected to both their beneficiaries and donors, and also promotes accountability within the sector.

We continue our focus on the annual 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence campaign which is being commemorated under the theme, ‘From Peace in the Home to Peace in the World: Let’s Challenge Militarism and End Violence Against Women’, from 25 November to 10 December 2012.

In line with the campaign, Sifiso Dube, gender justice and local government manager and Mercilene Machisa, gender based violence indicators manager at Gender Links, emphasise the need for governments and civil society organisations to invest in educating women, including those who reside in rural areas, about gender-based violence and the laws that are in place to protect them. Dube and Machisa argue that it is high time that governments and activists start talking about the economic empowerment of women. “…women who are economically independent have a far greater range of choices, and resources to legal redress,” they explain.

The SOS: Support Public Broadcasting campaign has expressed concern about the latest actions by the Minister of Communications, Dina Pule, to raise the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) amendment bill ‘from the dead’. SOS states that the Bill seeks to alter the role, powers and operations of ICASA. “…it [the Bill] flies in the face of and deeply undermines the promised information communication technology policy review process,” it argues.

In a related development, the National Council of Provinces may vote tomorrow (29 November 2012) to take the Secrecy Bill one step closer to becoming a Secrecy Law. After more than two years of intensive campaigning, the Right2Know Campaign states that despite the many amendments it has secured, the Secrecy Bill still fails its “Right2Know 7-Point Freedom Test” on all counts.